Somerset Avenue Tracks (1992-1995)

Combing the early part of electronic musician and Planet Mu founder Mike Paradinas'-- aka µ-Ziq-- career, Somerset Avenue Tracks is as raw as you’d expect from an artist just starting to find himself, but it's strong enough to stand with the best work that he’s done.

The 1990s experimental electronic scene that came to be known as "intelligent dance music" was simultaneously home to both the most anhedonic snobs to be found on the avant garde fringe (hence the genre's insufferably pretentious and sneak-dissing name) and its most genuinely entertaining eccentrics. Mike Paradinas, aka µ-Ziq, was of the latter type, and the music he was making at the time managed the improbable task of pushing the boundaries of aesthetics and techniques while also showing a genuine appreciation for less "intelligent" dance music styles, producing music you could actually dance to rather than simply appreciate on an intellectual level.

Somerset Avenue Tracks (1992-1995), the 300th release on his Planet Mu label, collects 24 previously unreleased recordings from the very beginnings of Paradinas’ solo career. Split between a disc compiled by his wife (and bandmate in the group Heterotic) Lara Rix-Martin and one of assorted odds and ends from his DAT archive, the set offers an in-depth look at the lead-up to to the material that would lead up to the albums Paradinas made his name off of, and a portrait of a young artist who displayed formidable talents from the very start.

Paradinas was only 22 years old at the beginning of the Somerset Avenue era, and although he’d already been playing for years in New Wave-influenced bands, he was something of a beginner in the field of programmed, beat-centric music. It seems like he was a natural, though-- the material here is impressively subtle, especially compared with the relentlessly smiley-faced happy hardcore that had come to define the UK rave scene by the time µ-Ziq launched.

“Johnson’s Q-Fab", from the first disc, is built around what initially seems like a simple combination of a tom-heavy techno drum beat and bits of airy synth pads, but over its seven minute running time introduces an increasing number of complications to the sequence that add a level of complexity. It makes the track far more compelling than the basic chillout-room ambient tracks of the time. Elsewhere, Paradinas dabbles in complexly broken beats, expertly tweaked analog synths, and fine-grained production techniques-- including some stroboscopic hi-hats that sound eerily prescient of EDM’s current trap music phase-- that are hard to believe he accomplished prior to the introduction of easy-to-use, graphics-based digital recording software.

One of the defining aspects of Paradinas’ body of work is a willingness to mess with genre conventions, often even as those conventions were in the process of being decided. Some of Somerset Avenue’s most gratifying moments come from experiments with au courant styles. “Boistron” takes the squelching 303 synths popularized by the acid house movement and sets them loose over a jacking beat that’s more spacious than the norm, and adds in strokes of semi-ambient keys that offer a unique twist of the paranoid edge that the form’s known for. “Poc” offers a throbbing, acidified take on the breakbeat style that around the time it must have been recorded was already well into the process of evolving into drum & bass.

Since the time he recorded the material that would end up on Somerset Avenue Tracks, Paradinas has gone further out, dabbling in jazz funk and other more cerebral-leaning forms, but he’s retained the same admirable focus on making music that’s both challenging and pleasurable to listen to. (An aspect of his personality that extends to Planet Mu’s support for intriguingly next-level styles like Chicago footwork.) Compared with the rest of his catalog, Somerset Avenue Tracks is as raw as you’d expect from an artist just starting to find himself, but it's strong enough to stand with the best work that he’s done.